November 4th D earest Chase, I am trying to "feef' Novem- ber, yours and mine. I'll make an imag- inary diorama, like something from grade school, an attempt to win a secret science fair of the heart: Janice and Chase's November. A mind's-eye min- iature I can peer into. (I won't mention this project to the Captain, or to the Russians, or to anyone else. We all know too much about one another's lit- de projects up here.) Is it cold yet? Is Manhattan beautiful? Have they put up the Christmas tree, or is it too soon? (I know you loathe Rockefeller Cen- ter.) Do you ever go to the Chinese garden at the Met, with the tiny gur- gling waterfall, where we once went and laid our heads together on a stone and fell asleep? (I don't know if I want to know whether you go there without me or not, so don't answer that ques- tion.) Do I sound idiotic? Forgive me, I'm going a little bonkers up here. Since the antifreeze leak-explosion, really- things have not been right. I'm sure Mission Control will have tried to keep any panic to a minimum-that's in their training, and, even more, it's in their nature. (Hello, Ted! And how are you, Arun? Are you sipping Ceylon as you read this?) Even among us six, we've quit discussing the incident- there's always the new day's tasks to think of. But in truth we nearly lost both the Den and the Greenhouse. And, without the Greenhouse, no food. And no air. No us. Northern Lights just an elaborate mausoleum, or perhaps a floating lab for an experiment in zero-gravity mummification. Mstislav, our most dedicated gar- dener now that Sledge rarely emerges from the Attic, has been tinkering with the carbon-dioxide balance, a dangerous but crucial sport. At six or seven hun- dred parts per million, the air in here is dreadful but sustains life. Regular jig- ê gering of organic functions is needed to 5 keep the ratio from ballooning to some- thing deadly. To make a long story short, after an alarmingly high read- 5- ing Mstislav discovered a mound of rot- u ting mangrove fronds under a seem- LU ingly healthy hillock of wheatgrass-a camouflaged nightmare of poison- leaching compost. Endgame for us could be that simple, that foolish. Ev- eryone, even the Captain and Sledge, was required to take up pitchforks in an ad-hoc campaign to clear the ferment- ing stew into garbage stockings, which then had to be banished from our air- space, pronto. Now, for months Keldysh has been stuffing waste into one of the three emergency modules, a reasonably nifty solution, with the notion that we'll eventually test our ability to launch the module and remote-control-dump its contents at the edge of the minefield that makes up our prison. Maybe our garbage, drifting slowly into Earth's gravity, could even take out some of the low-orbit mines the Chinese launched to keep us trapped here. A fantasy, per- haps. We'd have to eliminate hundreds for Mission Control even to begin to discuss reaching us with a shuttle. But we dream-why not? Well, this surplus of mulch-bulging stockings forced our hand, before Keldysh had any chance to chart a launch plan. Zamyatin was enraged at Keldysh for attempting the early launch, but wè d all encouraged him. And, in truth, we were all exhausted from twelve hours of what Mstislav laughingly called "serf toil," one of the rare jokes among the Russians that even Sledge and I could get. Also the last laugh wè d have for a while. Keldysh arced the module. It re- bounded off solar panel V, snapped off an antenna, and clanged disastrously against the Den's exterior tile. Glued to the video feed like teen-agers at a horror film, we saw the module tumble un- braked through, yes, the Chinese mines. Then flare and vanish. (Honesdy, I do think Keldysh by then had his head in his hands, and could have reversed the module's course ifhe hadn't been so de- spondent at the earlier impacts.) F are- well to excess compost, to unrecyclable plastic waste, to irredeemably shameful diapers, and to the module itself. The flume of mute fire another reminder, if we needed it, to recalibrate orbital decay daily. Like flossing. (I joke to keep your attention during the dry technical pas- sages, my darling distractible Chase.) I don't think anyone thought to inspect the Den's interior for damage until we smelled the antifreeze, a skunk's reek speeding through Northern Lights' tiny atmosphere. It was Mstislav who had the fore- sight to seal the Den remotely, then in- sist that we don oxygen masks and in- vestigate. Forget for now any damage to the exterior, which we were, of course, predisposed to concern ourselves with. (The rocket ship's hull, every space- man's concern!) By the time we reached the Den we'd lost Sledge somewhere, but the remaining five of us penetrated the area wearing masks, and discov- ered the wrecked antifreeze line spew- ing turquoise blobs, which floated and shattered to paint every surface of the Den's interior. Mstislav and Zamyatin clamped the line. Then, fresh off the serf toil in the Greenhouse, we space janitors set to scrubbing and sponging and wringing the blue goo into contain- ers, a task much like the pursuit of Dr. Seuss's Oobleck. (I still want to have children with you, Chase.) By the finish our uniforms were coated. Mstislav, champion of this episode, reasonably pointed out that any droplet of the pol- lutant we exported from the Den was destined for circulation and, ultimately, our mucous membranes. Our blood- streams. So we stripped and trashed the clothes. Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of shock, squeezing the last beads of antifreeze from our hair. (Don't be jealous. They've seen me naked be- fore. Anyway, on our present diet I'm shrunken to a ten-year-old's gaunt out- line, not exacdy turning heads. My pe- riods have stopped, too. And yes, again, I still want to have children with you, Chase.) At last, and ignoring various bruises and scrapes that first-aid proto- cols would have had us tend immedi- ately, we all slunk away to our various hidey- holes to strap ourselves to a wall for some desperately needed sleep. Starved as we were, I don't think anyone emerged for ten hours or more. I can't imagine that Mission Control will release too much of this report, ex- cept perhaps exclusively to you, Chase. Still, when our media-digest packet finally turns up (therè s so much demand for our scrawny bandwidth, so many technical transmissions in line ahead of anything personal, that the packet is usu- ally delayed a week or two), I'm always startled at how many columns the papers devote to us. How fascinating can we truly be? They'll forget us soon. We've practically forgotten ourselves. That's THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 17, 2008 93